I have listened to three books by Louise Penny in the Armand Gamache series. First I read How the Light Gets In (the last in the series) and then read the first. Now that I have read two more, I decided to write about the remainder of the series on this post as I read them rather than writing a new post for each book. The Cruelest Month. The old Hadley house continues to be a site of the horror...
Set in a village in Canada shortly after the end of World War I, this story of the struggle to return to something close to normal life focuses on Kenan, who lost use of one arm and one eye and was terribly scarred. He has returned home, but at the outset never leaves the house. We learn about his strained connection with his wife Tress, his exchange of letters with another surviving veteran, and...
The subtitle of this book, Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, gives you the idea. A more accurate, though less catchy subtitle would be Jokes That Illustrate Some Philosophical Concepts; I doubt anyone had any "Aha" moments. And if the joke made me laugh, sometimes I forgot the concept being illustrated. Usually the joke did make me laugh and I made the connection with the...
It was a worry that this novel wouldn't be as wonderful as Nina Stibbe's series of letters written to her sister while she was a nanny in London (Love, Nina). Turns out I needn't have worried. It was just as funny, perhaps even more so. When you read the plot summary, you may assume I'm kidding. The 9-year-old Lizzie, her older sister, and their younger brother leave London with...
According to Amazon, Bill Gifford has written for magazines such as Outside and Bicycling, as well as a stint writing for the Washington City Paper, a weekly alternative newspaper. This personal and thorough look at the science of and non-scientific practice of prolonging life written by a competent writer is a pleasure. Though the information is as overwhelming as water through a firehose...
It was Tony's mention of listening to Travels with My Aunt (made into a movie with Maggie Smith) that encouraged me to listen to Our Man in Havana. I had seen the movie with Alec Guinness years ago, but remember only his white suit and being confused. Of course I know and love some of his other works through movies, The End of the Affair and the wonderful The Third Man...
This is another one I chose because it's on the NYT list of 10 best books of 2014 (the other was All the Light We Cannot See). It is inspired by events in the life of Margaret Mead and takes place in 1933 in New Guinea where she and her husband worked briefly with Gregory Bateson who became her third husband. In the novel Nell and her husband Fen have just fled a malevolent tribe...
I listened to this book because it made onto the NYT top 10 books of the year, as well as other "best of 2014" lists. It is the story of two young people caught in the horror of World War II whose lives intersect near the end of the war. Marie-Laure, daughter of the locksmith of the natural history museum in Paris, becomes blind as a girl. Her father makes a wooden model of the...
This story is told by a housekeeper, a Japanese single mother, who works for an agency that sends her to various households. Her latest assignment is the professor, who has a very high turnover in housekeepers. He's problematic because while he had been a brilliant mathematician, an accident left him with a short-term memory that lasts only 80 minutes. He has an excellent memory for anything...
I found this book on Tony's list of the best fiction in 2013 and I agree it was a great book to listen to. Set in the 1920s, it is told in the voice of Rose, an orphan who becomes a typist in a police precinct in Brooklyn. Though she is a very proper person herself, through her job she has seen it all and has become inured to the miscreants of the world. One day a beautiful and...